Actually, I'm doing it more for my learning than anything else. I'm pretty passionate about IC engines/combustion and have wanted to apply some of the stuff I learned while in school to a project of mine.
One of the topics that I really want to learn about is how nitrous or water/meth injection affects the burn rate, burn duration, combustion stability, and optimal fuel and spark. Maybe some E85 stuff as well.

Feel free to propose other stuff as well that you'd like to see comparisons of - I'm always interested in figuring out why things do what they do.

I did originally want to do a spark plug type of transducer, but the cheapest that I was quoted was an Optrand PSIplug for $1100 and the plug adapter for another $200. I figured I could get a good estimate of how the cylinders were balanced with the O2 and EGT sensors and then correlate run quality of each cylinder based on the single transducer. In the end though, it was really a cost play so that I didn't have $10,500 wrapped up in transducers.

 

 

I wish I had $10k to throw at in-cylinder pressure (indicating) equipment, but I was able to buy new old stock stuff from a researcher to the tune of $550. Still expensive, but cheaper than the amount that I'd have to pay for a dyno to get the run quality where I want it to be, haha

 

You can find just about all of this information online already, if you were curious. I've found Linkoping University to have a nice repository of engine agnostic experiments that specifically and individually test countless operating conditions for their effects of cylinder mean effective pressures and emissions output. Anybody who is anybody will also have patented unique methods for determining these things which can be easily found on Google patents. Much of it is the same information that you have to pay for an SAE membership to get access to.

 

Whichever one can't cope with the poor tune......